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Mac help: What's the difference between Picasa & Adobe Bridge?

I hope I have this in the right forum, so bump me if it should be placed elsewhere.

I recently switched to a Mac and upgraded to PSE 8 for Mac which comes with Bridge. I used to use Picasa on my old PC and it worked great for me. This is what used to do with Picasa: I stored all my photos & digi supplies on an external drive and Picasa would just scan that drive & find all the photos & supplies and display them. I had a Photos folder broken down into year and month, and then a Digi Supply folder, which had a kit subfolder, templates subfolder, Quick Pick sub, etc. - all with the previews on front, so I just could glance at the preview to find if it had the look what I wanted, and if so, I could open the folder to view the papers, etc which could be automatically opened into PSE. Great, easy enough. I even had the kit previews sorted into albums - so I could find Halloween kits, etc. pretty easily.

Now, on my Mac, Picasa for Mac is just glitchy - no way around that - I've tried, but it isn't picking things up timely, it crashes, hangs, re-scans the entire drive, loses my album data regularly, etc - and it is common problem with Mac users from what I've read.

So, I'm now abandoning Picasa and looking for something similar. I don't really want something like iPhoto where I have to import digi supply files after I've downloaded them, and keep double copies of things. I liked how Picasa would just pick them up and show me them. Is Bridge what I want? Is there something else you might suggest for Mac users?

I'm on a Mac, but I've never used Picasa. I use Bridge all the time. Either for looking for kits, photos or whatever. If you have all your folders organized, as it seems you do, I love it for it's preview purposes. There are lots of other features for Bridge, but I use it mostly for previewing, from which you can directly open files in PS or PSE as well.

Like Darlene, I use Bridge, and it does just what I want it to do. You can have favorite folders listed along the left side so you can go there quickly, you can see all the things within the folder as you've organized them, you can easily rename files, delete them, and sort all the files differently. Also handy for seeing the EXIF info (camera data, file specs, etc.) right in Bridge without opening the file. Plus you can customize the working space in Bridge so you get all the options set up just as you want them.

You've got your organization set up, so just go to Bridge and it's easy peasy! Don't need iPhoto if you're using Elements or Photoshop.

Here are some instructional video's for pse6/mac
Under organizing photos, it will tell you how to use keywords, labeling and rating/ADDING KEYWORDS TO IMAGES w/bridge.

This is what I'm doing. I already have a file on my desktop with all my digi supplies and subfiles. I've always accessed it through bridge. But after adding keywords like the color, brads, leaves, paper-I can now go to edit>find>then under criteria I have keywords>contains>then type the color you want and click find.

So, if I'm looking for paper with the color red I'd type red>click find and it would bring up anything I have listed in that color.. So the idea when adding keyword is to put anything that you'd find that item for... Like leaves. I'd put green and leaves. Or a pink brad would of course be pink and brad.. That way I can look for anything pink which would be paper, brads, ribbons, etc or if I just want brads I'd put that to find all brads. Hope that made sense.

I find this usefull when looking for a certain item in a certain color with out going through each preview thats on my files. And its nice to look at all the items you have in one color.